Conflict and cooperation do not result from isolated individual actions. In settings such as insurgency, interstate conflict, protest mobilization, and informal governance, actors are highly interdependent. The study of networks aims to identify what the relevant interdependencies are and, crucially, how they shape conflict and cooperation outcomes. Although this is a relatively new research area, its early results convincingly establish that networks matter. Social networks provide information, transmit peer pressure, and structure interactions in ways that help groups overcome social dilemmas. With much research documenting the importance of particular outcomes in particular areas, the next major step will be putting the pieces together. Which connections between actors matter in which circumstances and how? The groundwork has been well laid for this large future research endeavor.
Settlers flocking to boomtowns on the American western frontier were faced with the same task that communities in weak states across the globe face in contemporary times: self-governance. Peer sanctions can enforce cooperation in these environments, but their efficacy depends on the social networks that transmit information from peer to peer. The author uses a game-theoretic model to show that peripheral network positions can generate such strong incentives to misbehave that persistent cheating occurs in equilibrium. The model reveals that groups maintaining high levels of cooperation that face shocks to their strategic environment or to their network can ratchet down into less cooperative equilibria in which the most peripheral become ostracized. Furthermore, population change that features rapid growth, high turnover, and enclave settlements can undermine cooperation. The insights from this article help to explain the trajectory of cooperation in the mining towns of the Wild West in which high levels of cooperation deteriorated as the population surged, and help to make sense of why only certain nonwhite settlers were targets of hostility and racism.
Bridging social ties is thought to reduce the likelihood of interethnic violence. This logic has motivated countless development projects and international programs seeking to forge cross-group ties between groups with a conflictual history. However, this article identifies an important mechanism by which certain cross-group ties can make interethnic peace strictly less likely. The results stem from a game-theoretic model which formalizes civil society as a network and relates intergroup cooperation to the particular networks that transmit information from person to person in each group. The model reveals that, first, groups are capable of enforcing cross-group cooperation, even when no cross-group ties are present and the networks within each group are missing links, using peer-enforcement strategies, and their ability to do so depends on the structure of these networks. Second, when attempting to enforce intergroup cooperation, groups with sparse networks may be at risk of a long-lasting series of back-and-forth retaliation that groups with denser networks would avoid. Finally, there exists a mechanism by which some cross-group ties make intergroup cooperation strictly less likely. When interethnic cooperation is enforced by threatening coordinated retaliation for any misbehavior, success depends on expectations about how quickly retaliation can be coordinated and how many will participate in it. Some individuals in a network are in a position to send news to many others quickly; others are not. The latter therefore coordinate retaliation more slowly and would be relatively vulnerable to cross-group defections if they could be identified. Cross-group ties expose the vulnerability and generate incentives to disrupt interethnic peace; cross-group ties between the least embedded individuals in each ethnic group are the most dangerous. Programs seeking to impose ties should avoid exposing this vulnerability without taking steps to mitigate its danger.
To answer questions about the origins and outcomes of collective action, political scientists increasingly turn to datasets with social network information culled from online sources. However, a fundamental question of external validity remains untested: are the relationships measured between a person and her online peers informative of the kind of offline, "real-world" relationships to which network theories typically speak? This article offers the first direct comparison of the nature and consequences of online and offline social ties, using data collected via a novel network elicitation technique in an experimental setting. We document strong, robust similarity between online and offline relationships. This parity is not driven by sharedidentityof online and offline ties, but a shared nature of relationships in both domains. Our results affirm that online social tie data offer great promise for testing long-standing theories in the social sciences about the role of social networks.
Interventions aimed at reducing prejudice toward refugees have shown promise in industrialized countries. However, the vast majority of refugees are in developing countries. Moreover, while these interventions focus on individual attitude change, attitudes often do not shift in isolation; people are embedded in rich social networks. We conducted a field experiment in northwestern Uganda (host to over a million refugees) and find that perspective-taking warmed individual attitudes there in the short term. We also find that the treatment effect spills over from treated households to control ones along social ties, that spillovers can be positive or negative depending on the source, and that peoples' attitudes change based on informal conversations with others in the network after the treatment. The findings show the importance of understanding the social process that can reinforce or unravel individual-level attitude change toward refugees; it appears essential to designing interventions with a lasting effect on attitudes.
AbstractMeasuring networks in the field—usually by asking individuals systematically about their networks–entails complex design choices, with large consequences for the resulting data. Because observations in a network are interconnected, well-established practices from non-network survey settings can lead researchers astray. Despite the increasing focus on networks in political science, little guidance is available for researchers facing high-stakes decisions when designing a study to elicit networks. This paper serves as a practical guide. It offers a simple framework for constructing a network theory, illuminates tradeoffs like measuring more nodes versus more ties per node or asking for names versus selections from a list, and proposes a new technique for cleaning relational data.
AbstractWhile rumors predominate in conflict settings, researchers have not identified whether and why they influence the start of organized armed conflict. In this paper, we advance a new conceptualization of initial rebel group formation that aims to do so. We present a simple game-theoretic network model to show why the structure of trusted communication networks among civilians where rebel groups form—which carry credible rumors about the rebels—can influence whether incipient rebels become viable. We argue further that in rural Sub-Saharan Africa, kinship network structures favorable to nascent rebels often underlie ethnically homogeneous localities, but not heterogeneous ones. In doing so, we advance a new explanation for why ethnicity influences conflict onset, and show why ethnic grievances may not be a necessary condition for the emergence of "ethnic rebellion." We illustrate our arguments using new evidence from Uganda that provides a rare window into rebel group formation.
AbstractActive research on a wide range of political contexts centers on ethnicity's role in collective action. Many theories posit that information flows more easily in ethnically homogeneous areas, facilitating collective action, because social networks among coethnics are denser. Although this characterization is ubiquitous, little empirical work assesses it. Through a novel field experiment in a matched pair of villages in rural Uganda, this article directly examines word‐of‐mouth information spread and its relationship to ethnic diversity and networks. As expected, information spread more widely in the homogeneous village. However, unexpectedly, the more diverse village's network is significantly denser. Using unusually detailed network data, we offer an explanation for why network density may hamper information dissemination in heterogeneous areas, showing why even slight hesitation to share information with people from other groups can have large aggregate effects.
AbstractThe social networks that interconnect groups of people are often "multi-layered"—comprised of a variety of relationships and interaction types. Although researchers increasingly acknowledge the presence of multiple layers and even measure them separately, little is known about whether and how different layers function differently. We conducted a field experiment in twelve villages in rural Uganda that measured real multi-layer social networks and then tracked their use in response to new, discussion-provoking information about refugees. We find that people who received our information treatment discussed refugees with more people, selected discussion partners from neighbors in the multi-layer network, and used most of the layers to do so. Treatment kicked off conversations throughout the villages that also included control respondents; treated and control both selected discussion partners from their networks who shared their attitudes towards refugees and were particularly interested in the subject. Our results point to multi-layer networks of day-to-day interactions as a source of prospective discussion partners when new information arises, especially layers based on shared meals, homestead visits, and money borrowing. When a relationship is based on multiple of these layers, it is even more likely to facilitate discussion. Furthermore, the selection of discussion partners from these networks depends less on any one particular layer and more on characteristics of the tie relative to the topic at hand.
